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He watched as she located a file and flipped through the contents, pulling out a single piece of paper. As she sat down in Clayton’s chair to study it, he could almost make out her face. Something glittered by her left ear, reflecting the tiny glow from the penlight. It was a diamond earring shaped like a heart. Vanessa had heart-shaped diamond earrings. But why was she so interested in Clayton’s files? He took one step closer, and then another. When he got close enough to make out the label on the file, he smiled. Vanessa was going through Hal’s papers. That was nothing to worry about, but he’d keep an eye on her until she left.

Vanessa almost laughed out loud. Hal had moved over four million dollars into his numbered Swiss account. He was a real bastard, and a dumb one at that. His birth date was the access code. Jack had once told her how common that was, when she’d asked him about the security business.

She put the file back in the drawer and closed it. Now she’d act perfectly normal until the access road was cleared, then take off for Switzerland on the very first flight.

Vanessa smiled. Switzerland. She’d always wanted to go there and she might just do that once she’d gone to the bank and cleaned out Hal’s account. They had wonderful skiing, and she’d always wanted to shop in the boutiques at St. Moritz. Best of all, there wasn’t a thing Hal could do. There was nothing illegal about a wife making a withdrawal from her husband’s Swiss bank account. That’s exactly what had happened in the movie she’d seen.

She shined the penlight all around the office, checking to make sure she hadn’t left anything out of place and then she headed for the door. If Hal decided to check up on her, she wanted to be in bed, sleeping like a baby.

Vanessa was nearing the end of the hallway when the lights in the rose garden came on. She whirled and bolted for the door before remembering that Clayton had them on a timer. There was no need to be so jumpy. She stopped and took a calming breath as she looked out at the garden. It had been beautiful the first time she’d seen it, with tiny sparkling lights and a white latticework gazebo. Two round wrought-iron tables, painted dazzling white, were surrounded by eight matching chairs. Darby had been fond of having her morning coffee in the garden, surrounded by the sweet scent of her beautiful roses.

Things were a lot different now that Darby was dead. The paint was peeling off the wrought-iron tables and the roses looked as if they were growing wild. Nevertheless, one perfect pink rose bloomed on a bush in the back. It would look lovely in the silver vase she had in her bedroom. Hal hadn’t given her roses in at least a year and they were her favorite.

Opening the French doors, Vanessa stepped into the garden. It was lovely out here in the climate-controlled dome. There was something magical about flowers blooming in the dead of winter. Roses in the snow. A great title for a movie and now that she was about to become a wealthy woman, she might just decide to finance it.

She grabbed the clippers from the nail in the gazebo and headed for the perfect rose. It would only take a moment. As she took a detour around two bushes that had grown together in a tangle of branches, her sandal sank into a patch of soft ground. Someone had been digging out here and the soil was loose. Had Clayton hired a new gardener? Vanessa bent over for a closer look.

Lines of concentration creased Betty’s forehead as she tried to make sense out of the talk show. The host had a towel wrapped around his head and the audience laughed every time he spoke. Betty didn’t think he was very funny, but the people did. Perhaps you couldn’t appreciate him when you had a disease like hers.

She was watching the regular channels now because Nurse would be back in a minute to give her the needle and put her to bed. It had been a pretty good night for television, and she’d enjoyed the charades on forbidden channel two. The cowgirl had been very good and so had that nice colored man. Betty seemed to remember that colored was an obsolete term. Now they wanted to be called black, or maybe Afro-American, she wasn’t sure which. When the colored man came to visit her, she’d just say hello and avoid calling him anything. That was the smart thing to do.

When the charades had stopped, Betty had switched through the other forbidden channels. There had been a lot of cooking shows on tonight and she didn’t feel like watching those, but she’d found something very interesting on channel five.

That pretty young actress was back, searching for something. She seemed to be typecast in the role of searcher. When she left the room where the papers were kept, Betty had assumed the movie was over. She had been about to switch the channel when she’d seen the actress open the doors to the garden, the same one she’d seen in the funeral movie. Would the undertaker appear? Betty hoped so.

There he was! Betty had clapped her hands together in delight. He was her very favorite actor, unless you counted Jack, who was in the hospital. They didn’t run many hospital movies now.

Betty reached for a blank disk and put it into the machine, pushing the button to record. She’d start a collection to show Jack when he came back home. While the undertaker series wasn’t as funny as the movies that Jack had recorded for her, it was still very exciting. She gasped as the sharp metal thing crashed down. You’d never guess they made those things out of Styrofoam so they couldn’t hurt anybody. Then the actress had crumpled to the ground very gracefully, and since she was pretending to be dead, she hadn’t moved at all.

Would the undertaker bury her in another funeral? Betty had leaned forward to peer at the screen intently. No, he just put the Styrofoam shovel back in the gazebo, wrapped the pretty actress in a big plastic tarp, and carried her down the hall to the stairwell. Once they’d gone through the door, Betty had known that the forbidden channel five movie-of-the-night was over, but she might be able to catch the rest of the film on another channel.

She had been looking for the ending of the movie when she’d heard Nurse coming with the warm milk and cookies she always had before bedtime. She’d barely had time to switch to a talk show before Nurse had come into her room with the tray. It had been a close call. Very close. She had to remember to be more careful in the future now that Jack wasn’t here to remind her.

The man who loved Budweiser beer was rolling his eyes at something Johnny had said and the audience was laughing again. Betty frowned. She liked the forbidden channels much better. Should she take a chance and scan them to see if she could find the end of the movie?

There was water running in the bathroom. That meant Nurse was fixing her face. Nurse took a long time every night in the bathroom. She’d explained it all to Betty. When people got older, their skin dried out. That meant they had to use moisturizers. Nurse put a pink cream on her face every night that had to stay there for five minutes. Then she washed it off and put on a moisturizer. Betty hadn’t said what she’d been thinking out loud, that nothing could help Nurse from looking like one of those big black birds.

Betty took a chance and reached for the remote control. She had to find out where the undertaker would bury the actress. It was a very important part of the movie.

There he was again on forbidden channel one, carrying the searcher into a room of ice. There was a word for a place like that, but Betty couldn’t think of it. She winced as he rolled her out of the tarp, then chuckled at her own foolishness. Of course they’d stopped the cameras to put in a mannequin just like the doll-lady made, so the actress could go back to her dressing room to rehearse her next scene. It looked so real, it had almost fooled her. Movie magic was wonderful!

When the water stopped running, Betty put on the talk show again. She was laughing at the towel around the host’s head, it took a certain amount of courage to appear on television in a silly-looking thing like that, when Nurse came in with the bedtime needle.